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2 September 2005

Opinion/Editorial Section…

WAITING FOR THE OUTSIDE WORLD Mike Ferner, Electronic Iraq (1 September 2005)

In the “old days” of the U.S. peace movement, when many people focused on the threat of a global nuclear “exchange” an organization called Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) postulated what would happen if a major American city was actually blasted by an atomic bomb. Today, listening to and watching the news coming out of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast towns of Mississippi, one can sense devastation on a scale rarely experienced in this country. What would it be like to endure suffering on a scale somewhere between a nuclear attack and Hurricane Katrina ˆ with nobody “out there” to mobilize assistance for you? That is the case today in Iraq.

There is Such a Thing as “Too Late” Ray McGovern, Electronic Iraq (31 August 2005)

“I believe Cindy Sheehan provides prophetic example for us all. She let herself be guided by the spirit within. President George W. Bush had said that the sacrifice of our dead soldiers, including Casey, was “worth it.‰ And earlier this month he added that it was all in a “noble cause.” Cindy, while giving a talk at a conference in Dallas, spontaneously asked if someone would come with her to Crawford, because she needed to ask the president what it was that he was describing as a “noble cause.” You know the first chapter of the rest of the story.” Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC, and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. On Wednesday, he arrived home in Arlington, VA, after five days in Crawford, and shared these remarks with 300 neighbors at the close of a candlelight observance in honor of Cindy Sheehan.

Wednesday’s tragic events in Iraq illustrate the way in which this country is being slowly ripped apart. Rumors of a suicide bomber induced panic in the roughly one million Shiites gathered at the Shrine in Kadimiyya to mourn and commemorate the death of the Imam Musa Al-Kadim. As the crowd stampeded, over 800 were either crushed to death or drowned after falling off a bridge and into the Tigris River. This tragedy for the Shiites was accompanied by tragedy for the Sunnis as well, as US warplanes bombed a Sunni town in western Iraq, killing forty-five, including many women and children.

BAGHDAD, 1 Sep 2005 (IRIN) – At least a thousand people were killed on Wednesday, when Shi’ite Muslim pilgrims stampeded on a bridge spanning the Tigris River in northern Baghdad after rumors that a suicide bomber was present, officials said.

“How illegal is it to vandalize a wall,” asks Banksy in his website introduction to his Wall project, “if the wall itself has been deemed unlawful by the International Court of Justice? The Israeli government is building a wall surrounding the occupied Palestinian territories. It stands three times the height of the Berlin wall and will eventually run for over 700km – the distance from London to Zurich. The International Court of Justice last year ruled the wall and its associated regime is illegal. It essentially turns Palestine into the world’s largest open-air prison.”